[MPlayer-dev-eng] Linking mplayer fails

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 1 Apr 2013, at 20:36, Alex Romosan <romosan at sycorax.lbl.gov> wrote:
> Reimar Döffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de> writes:
> 
>> No, that will completely break it! The point is to detect whether the
>> (assembler) code we create must be PIC, not forcing the compiler to
>> generate PIC code!
>> PIC is not something we should _ever_ enable by default as your
>> suggestion does, but only if we have to.
> 
> so how exactly is your test supposed to work? why would gcc just
> generate position independent code if you don't ask it to?

Due to profiles (used by gentoo hardened), due to PIE (on architectures where this implies PIC), due to environments that mandate PIC (OSX without -mdynamic-no-pic I believe), due to compiler options (-fPIC in --extra-cflags, though that could be considered a user error).
I might have missed a few.